The Wandering Jew arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico

It’s easy to approach the Da Vinci Code genre with a healthy dose of skepticism. Although one would be hard pressed to find better ways to pique the public’s interest in history — particularly that of religious art — than through a thrilling, mysterious, and dangerous trip down a historical rabbit hole, that journey can sometimes rely on simplistic and even sloppy readings of said history.

The likes of Indiana Jones, after all, isn’t likely to show up at faculty meetings at most universities on this planet.

Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin’s new graphic novel Iluminado tackles an even more ambitious secretive historical narrative — that of crypto-, or hidden converso Jews — and traces its story form Spain to the New World to Santa Fe. That Stavans, who plays himself in the novel as a Spanglish expert, is a professor in Latin American and Latino culture (Spanish) at Amherst College in Massachusetts lends the project even more credibility, although Douglas Wolk, writing for the Jewish Daily Forward, is far from impressed with the story or the art.

Although Wolk dismisses Sheinkin’s drawings as not bad by 7th-grade standards, many readers will find the simplicity of the art a welcome life preserver to grab onto during the frequent scene changes, fast pace, and nuanced vantage points of the narrative. The tale that Stavans and Sheinkin weave is often a complicated one to follow, and parsing together at the end what is fact and what is fiction can be its own journey.

Even when the reader knows what’s lurking around the corner, the next development is still surprising, from the early death (murder or suicide?) of one Rolando Pérez to a lecture on crypto-Judaism that Stavans delivers to the intercession of the police, the Catholic Church, and a surprising villain (not unlike a wrinkle in Da Vinci Code). The few glimpses one gets of the life of one Luis de Carvajal the Younger are fascinating, and makes one even more curious about the figure who is referred to as the first Jewish writer in the new world.